Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday March 04, 2010 @08:30PM
from the you've-been-very-very-naughty dept.

jasonbrown writes "Apple on Thursday began removing another category of apps from its iPhone App Store. This time, it's not porn, it's Wi-Fi. Apple removed several Wi-Fi apps commonly referred to as stumblers, or apps that seek out available Wi-Fi networks near your location. According to a story on Cult of Mac, apps removed by Apple include WiFi-Where, WiFiFoFum, and yFy Network Finder."

If you refer to his novels, 'Kafkaesque' would most likely denote the endless pain and futility of dealing with an organization where the participant has no idea what hoops to jump through until they are prevented without achieving them.

Kafka used the individual's ignorance of the system as a weapon that is used to dis-empower him. Even the most crazily elaborate set of obstacles can be overcome with planning and diligence if you're aware of them, but in Kafka's novels, there was always a new challenge to overcome whenever the previous one was achieved. This ultimate futility was the driving theme of many of his stories.

Dictionary quote:adjectiveComplex or illogical in a bizarre, surreal, or nightmarish manner.

In either case, the original poster of the phrase miss-appropriated it into their post to express what would be best served just dropping the word and leaving the sentence in tact without "active enforcement of ever-shifting, secret rules against applications" would have served just fine.

The term "Kafkaesque" usually refers to Kafka's "The Trial", where a man is arrested and prosecuted without ever being told what the crime is. Although sometimes it refers to "Metamorphosis", which involves people turning into giant roaches. You make the call.

Can you honestly say that with a straight face while browsing the hundreds of fart apps and stupid slideshows of 5 pictures or less? The App store is indeed cluttered by tens of thousands of utterly useless and worthless apps, but the Wi-Fi finding category is certainly not contributing by much.

Clutter is the wrong word, however, you are correct in that the use of unpublished APIs should be enforced. The problem with the average use is, that if an App uses a private API and that API changes, the user will blame Apple when the next version of iPhone OS breaks the app. Developers should NOT use unpublished APIs in production software.

"We received a very unfortunate e-mail today from Apple stating that WiFi-Where has been removed from sale on the App Store for using private frameworks to access wireless information," WiFi Where-maker Three Jacks Software, wrote on its Web site.
There was no explanation as to what Apple meant by "private frameworks." Apple representatives were not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNET.
TechCrunch says Tonchidot, a Tokyo-based developer, had its app Sekai Camera removed because of its use of Wi-Fi, too. Sekai Camera uses PlaceEngine as a way to determine a user's location over Wi-Fi.
PlaceEngine developer Koozyt says other apps that use its technology have also been removed, including Yahoo! Maps for the iPhone.

So it looks like this may be about the PlaceEngine framework, not wifi per se. And this is why we need to RTFA, there are just too many false and/or misleading summaries.

I mean, look up the NextStep demo on youtube. Thats from 1993! The PC world was on Windows 3.1 or DOS, while Jobs is sending voice annotated email, developing a GUI database app with drag and drop (virtually no co

It appears Apple's problem with the apps isn't with what they do but with how they do it; namely, using non-public frameworks. There probably isn't a way to do it using public frameworks, though (on Mac OS X, you need to use the private Apple80211.framework, not sure about iPhone OS X).

It appears Apple's problem with the apps isn't with what they do but with how they do it; namely, using non-public frameworks. There probably isn't a way to do it using public frameworks,

So, according to your logic, Apple pulled the applications not because of their function but because they did not implement it using public frameworks, however Apple have not sanctioned this function in the official framework? Presumably this was done because Apple does not agree with/want the function.

How else do you explain it? If Apple did not care about the function it would leave the app's as they were, if it did care about the function it would include it in the public frameworks?

Function is the common denominator in the revoked applications, to try and say it they were retroactively revoked due to some QA seems absurd due to the fact that only applications with a specific function were targeted . It seems failing to make that particular assumption is like not being able to put two and two together (be careful with Occam's razor, it's sharp).

You don't seem to understand WHY programming interfaces are labeled public and private, or stable and unstable.If they cared about the functionality, they could whip up a technical means of restricting access. Private interfaces are private because they might not be formally documented, designed or committed to. What's private now might be made public later if there is enough demand for it and the design is solid. If they liked the design of it, it would probably already be a public interface though...

No, other apps that do the same thing are still allowed and available in the app store.

As far as I can tell, these other apps don't scan actively for access points. That is, they don't use the private framework.

(on Mac OS X, you need to use the private Apple80211.framework, not sure about iPhone OS X).

No you don't.

Yes, you do.

That is, unless you want to rewrite the portion of the Darwin kernel that interfaces with the plethora of wireless network devices that Mac OS X is designed to handle, and provide support for that, all for your wifi stumbler or whatever. The option is always open to roll your own code, even in these cases on the iPhone. Sometimes, though, that option is just stupid.

Unlike with iPhones and iPads, with their crippled phoneOS, I can use any framework I want that I can install on my MacBook Pro.

The iPhone OS is far from crippled. It's a full UNIX running on a phone, with a full-featured Apple Objective-C runtime, with a snazzy custom multitouch UI. The sandbox and features given to developers through the official Apple program is crippled. The OS is not.

To be pedantic, as well, you can use any framework you want that you can install on your iPhone as well. You may have to jailbreak it to get write access to the frameworks, but you can still use it once it's on there.

The iPhone OS is far from crippled. It's a full UNIX running on a phone, with a full-featured Apple Objective-C runtime, with a snazzy custom multitouch UI. The sandbox and features given to developers through the official Apple program is crippled. The OS is not.

If I can not install whatever software on my equipment and instead have to use the app store then it is crippled. If I don't do what I want on it that I can do on my Mac then it is crippled.

To be pedantic, as well, you can use any framework you want that you can install on your iPhone as well. You may have to jailbreak it to get write access to the frameworks, but you can still use it once it's on there.

But I don't have to jailbreak my Mac. Heck I've even got assistance from Apple store genuses to set up my Mac to dual boot Ubuntu. What I have been told at a store though is that they can not help me with developer uses, instead I'm referred to the Apple Developer Connection [apple.com].

Why do they need to protect me from maintaining my app? If I use an API and they do something that breaks it, it's my responsibility to fix it or they pull the app.

If it's an officially documented API, that is not the case, at least not with Mac OS X (and, as far as I know, with other commercial UN*Xes and Windows). People generally get peeved if updating the OS breaks an app, and the first organization to which they complain is likely to be the OS vendor, so the OS vendor makes at least some effort not to break APIs. I think Raymond Chen [msdn.com] has talked about this at Microsoft, and it's also an issue at Apple (try doing nm -p/usr/lib/libSystem.dylib | egrep '\$' on OS

if it's for using private API's, avoiding the MS bad publicity. everyone worked around MS bugs and Microsoft couldn't make needed changes in their OS's due to developers complaining it was going to cause them to write code. in Vista they had to pull a new anti-virus API because of this.

Apple is just forcing everyone to follow the rules in the developer agreement. last thing Apple wants is to release an iPhone OS update and to have thousands of apps fail due to private API use and then all the devs will complain how it's Apple's fault

The thing is, the iPhone OS is short-term, a desktop OS is long-term. Even if design principles of iPhone OS doesn't change much in 2013, hardware will have advanced monumentally to the point where it might be nearly impossible to even run applications.

What really makes sense on high-capacity devices such as the iPhone is to allow small "emulated" apps to be run in earlier versions of iPhone OS with the older APIs when it detects a version that is untested with the current version.

The kind of total control over their platform which they expect to have. I'm reminded of the quote on Twitter the other day from the story about the top developers fired by Activision: "Getting mad at [Apple] for this is like getting mad at an ape for throwing feces. It's just how the beast communicates."

This kind of control is Apple's MO, and anyone buying their products should either know that, or wouldn't be affected by it (some people do want their choices made for them).

But OS X would not be successful if it was not open. If OS X would not allow various apps that wouldn't be allowed on the iPhone to be on OS X, it would have almost no marketshare.

It is only a temporary glitch of the failures of all other mobile OSes at the time (Windows Mobile, Symbian, That crappy Java-Based OS, etc), large portions of the phone being paid for by phone carriers and the like that let the iPhone get even a small marketshare. If Google ever gets their act together, Android can easily cru

I'm so glad you make all the hard decisions for me! Would you like to cast my next vote for me?? Oh yeah, when I actually succumb to mobile devices they will be open. This is like Microsoft telling you what software you can install on Windows! Is this the future? Twenty years from now Mac's will only be able to get applications from Apple's approved store? Yeah, I'm not gonna help with that.

Until all mobile phones suck a lot less or go down in price a lot, I'm not getting one. $2500 for two years? No thanks. Even if the devices available were polished, beautiful, powerful, and bug-free. And they're not.

Still it's only a matter of time. I said the same thing about cell phones, and then prices dropped and coverage improved, and now I have one.

This is like Microsoft telling you what software you can install on Windows!

Just so we're clear here, it'd be like if Microsoft could decide what software it wanted to host on it's servers, and provide a shop framework for. Which, last time I checked, they have every right to do.

There is a difference here, obviously. For most people (those who haven't jailbroken), Apple's store is the only place to get software. Apple has to approve this software. But since when is this any different than the software released for the xbox 360 or any other game console? At least Apple has a reasona

Though this is just a first step toward an iPhone-like developer model,

By which I presume you mean "a model where they only charge you $99/year, don't have multiple tiers of developer, and perhaps don't offer hardware discounts". There are a number of ways in which the Mac OS X and iPhone OS developer programs differ; the fact that they're getting rid of one of them (higher price) does not ipso facto mean that the long-term plan is to make the Mac OS X developer program exactly like the iPhone OS program, down to the app store and restrictions.

What scares me about this though is that Apple are gradually being sucked into their own hype; that only end-to-end control of the experience by Apple is the way to ensure quality. This in spite of the obvious failure in quality control in their store and the many inconsistencies in applying their policy.

All I can say is get a real phone with options you like eg android, nokia 9x ect.
Apple makes a great OS, some great hardware.
Just stay away from the DRM junk and itoys.
Or help port a real OS to it.
As amazon showed with 1984, MS with win 7 mobile and now Apple shows, your just a consumer renting space on their their vision of the world.
Time to disconnect Apple and buy or use/write a real mobile OS.

Apple has NEVER permitted the use of private frameworks in iPhone apps. My company had to rewrite an app we were trying to deploy because we were using some undocumented features for still frame capture from the camera device. We almost made it through the authorization process, then Apple shot us down at the last second because of it. We had to wait a few more minor releases before the functionality we needed was exposed through an approved interface. It had nothing to do with our application, but rather, the way it was implemented.

In general, the use of undocumented APIs is frowned upon throughout the industry, as it makes for flaky application and reverse-vendor-lockin, when an extremely popular application relies on undocumented APIs, the APIs change, then people come bitching to the platform manufacturer for "breaking" their applications. There's nothing weird about this, whatsoever. Chill out, folks.

Sadly this critical part of the story is being submerged under the usual "Apple is the great Satan" Slashdot groupthink. It seems to be an easy road to be modded up if a poster makes a short criticism of Apple, even if they don't know any of the facts.

Your user number is low enough for you to have been here when/. blew up about Microsoft using internal APIs that no one else knew about. IIRC such actions got them in a little bit of legal trouble.

That was a lot of beers in the past. Perhaps you could refresh my memory and we can actually have a conversation about it. I vaguely remember something of it, but I was using Linux and as such, didn't really care about Microsoft's monopolist practices since I had already escaped them.

This is great news !! This is the only way developers and users will learn never to trust a closed platform. Hopefully this starts pissing people off enough to go towards Android, or preferably the only truly open smartphone OS : Maemo / Meego. So I say, please Apple, remove more useful apps !!

This is the only way developers and users will learn never to trust a closed platform.

As a developer, I like the enforcement of the "no private frameworks" rule. I don't want to have to compete against other developers who can implement things I can't implement, because they are willing to stay up for three weeks reverse-engineering some undocumented interface. It's kind of like doping in the Olympics. If everybody was allowed to do it, soon it would be impossible to be competitive UNLESS you were doing it, and the result would be an incredible mess where every application was doing things using undocumented interfaces. And on top of that, Apple would have to be extremely careful whenever they want to alter their "private" APIs because it would risk breaking a huge number of applications -- and guess who the end user is going to complain to? (Hint -- not the application developer.)

If you don't like the restrictions, fine. Jailbreak your phone. Or choose a different platform. I'd rather work with something stable where the playing field is somewhat level.

Since nobody on Slashdot knows a single thing about this action by Apple -- at this moment -- why don't we just post a bunch of shit that has absolutely no merit?! Hey, we can even call ourselves "journalists"!

If the issue is that the Apps used a private API, how did they get approved in the first place?

Because over time Apple gets better about figuring out who is using private API's.

In the early days it was the most egregious violations that visually screamed out "hey look, I am using a private API" - like Coverflow.

So then that died down, and for a while people got away with undocumented framework and system calls.

But recently Apple has started basically using a symbol analyses tool looking for calls to specific system stuff. I can imagine it was only recently they thought to look at super low level network stuff.

Apple even has been pretty nice about it generally, most developers just get a warning saying "you are using a private API, fix that before your next update please". I guess whatever this framework was using was a little more undesirable than most calls.

Happens every time and even though the intelligent users of slashdot are more than aware of this, they can't seem to fight the compulsion to re-re-re-re-state their position/perception/opinion on the matter.

Apple strong on consistent user experience. (by this I mean consistent with apple's ever-changing idea of what the user experience should be.)

Android strong on openness and flexibility. (except for where the carriers object and attempt to control it... but even then, not so much.)

When the iPhone came out with a battery that couldn't be replaced by the user, I wrote it off. To me, that was the primary show-stopper. It's a privacy and security concern. It's a battery life/conservation concern. It's even a safety concern.

Android, on the other hand is interesting in that it is yet another high profile Linux based product that has elements of traditional Linux failure all over it. I don't mean this to sound as bad as it sounds, but I can think of no better way to put it. The game isn't over yet and perhaps the people steering Android will see the failures and find some solutions, but what traditional failures am I talking about? Simple: "Being strong on consistent user experience" among other things.

Previous articles on slashdot came close to describing problems by talking about the wide variety of android phones and how software for one does not work for all. (it's not a problem for normal Linux hackers... we know all about tarballs, DEBs and RPMS, i386/i586/i686/x86_64/PPC and other divisions based on which version of glibc it was compiled for.) But there is more. The apps themselves are "more free" and therefore have less consistent delivery of look and feel. When this happens, a solid device starts to feel like a handful of marbles. At some level of consciousness, we all perceive problems when we are presented with things that don't match up well. Whether or not it's an actual problem is irrelevant to the feelings of the user (which, by the way is foremost on the minds at Apple) which is where the real success or failure of a project lies. "Better things" fail all the time at the hands of better marketing of lesser things. If people feel one thing is better than another or more reliable or will last longer or be supported longer or will have better backing, the truth doesn't matter so much as their feelings.

As a Linux optimist, I see this as an opportunity for Linux to gain recognition and public favor. We all know that Linux is a kernel and that it's in a LOT of stuff everywhere that most people never see or think about. We also know that because it's just a kernel, the REAL problems are in how it's packaged with other things... with or without a GUI, which GUI, what package management, etc. But there's more. Look and feel has never really been stressed. KDE users will probably disagree with me on this because KDE does, in fact, push more in favor of a consistent look and feel. But they are an exception.

But even if the Android project pulls itself together and actually does build a very successful consumer implementation of a Linux based OS, it can't quite be said "It's good because it's Linux." It would still be more accurate to say "It's good in spite of being Linux" because at the moment, a successful consumer Linux OS doesn't fix all the others that we know and love.

I use WiFiFoFum at my hospital to check the strength of the Wireless AP's scattered through the floors. At the moment I'm using it on a Intermec CN3 handheld scanner that we're using for Medicine scanning and verification. I wanted to get an iTouch or an iPhone so I could use it on that device since I may or may not be able to keep the CN3 that I'm currently using as my dedicated Test Platform.

By denying us access to such tools, Apple is alienating the IT Professional community and may drive us to find other applications or even (in their eyes) worse, jail-breaking the damn things so we CAN run whatever the hell we want and not what THEY want us to run.

Remember the days when we used to mock Microsoft and their advertisements by saying "Microsoft: You WILL go here today!"?

Apple's corporate nannyism is indeed a pain, and it's what keeps me away from iPhone. But I can't say I like Android any better. It's the usual disorganized Google product, where every product is viewed as emergent [wikipedia.org] from a lot of independent programmers each doing their own thing. So there's no central vision to the product. You have a total mess of a platform that isn't even a single platform, since every Android hardware implementation is different from every other.

Really, our choices suck. Maemo (or whatever it's called now) will never achieve critical mass. Windows Moblle is, well, Windows. Symbian is showing its age. Blackberry is designed for somebody who texts a lot more than I do.

I'm sort of flirting with getting a WebOS phone, except I don't trust Palm not to screw this product up, the way they've screwed up every other product. Also, a phone plan that supports it properly costs $60/month (3G data rates in the U.S. are totally out of hand), and while I like having the Internet in my pocket, I'm not sure I like it that much.

What I should really do is go back to having a separate phone and PDA, and put up with the hassle of sharing data between them manually. (With a PAYG plan, I'd probably save $50/month.) Except nobody makes a decent PDA any more...

The builtin one is way worse though. It can't find wifis with no SSID and has a much higher threshold on the signal strength. No SSID might be a misconfigured wifi, but for example on a bus trip there's not much I can do about that as a passenger.

No - the oddness here is that people can't see beyond the end of their nose. The issue is not that a specific class of applications has been pulled but that any application is pulled. I am not going to argue with Apple's right to choose what happens on their App Store but I do question a geeks's choice when he supports a closed system over an open one. When others are making the decisions the function he takes for granted in the form that he deems pleasing is eventually going to be eroded. The market will decide whether this is a good thing for Apple's bottom line but for a geek to be an Apple apologist now just seems plain weird.

Actually I probably misrepresented my views. I think it is fair enough to just 'not care' and use a product because it does what you want. But detaching personal preferences from the wider issue is important. The creeping control mindset which is increasingly evident at Apple does have negative consequences. To think that Apple used to be about individual expression . . . to see what it has become is frankly depressing!

Because we simply don't care? People here get so stressed about some of the most pedantic things. I use the WiFi outside my home once in a blue moon. It's just not that important since my data plan is unlimited. 3G is perfectly suitable for the occasional internet need while I'm at the doctors office, or sitting eating lunch and reading slashdot or some random news tidbit.

Standard Apple rule - if the Iphone has it, it's great (3G, unlimited dataplan). If not, it's "Why would I need that" or "Why care?" The great thing about this rule is that you can even change when new features are out - e.g., the Iphone had 3G years after other phones, before then it was "Why would I need that?"

but it's almost like there's a complete disconnect between the geeks and the typical user in here.

Yes, in that Apple phones are far more popular here than in the general public, judging by market share.

This whole Apple/Droid thing reminds me of the old Windows/Apple wars.

More like BeOS versus OS/2.

Every iPhone topic turns into how Apple is evil (+1 insightful, yeah baby), and how we should despise them (+1 underrated), or their the new 'Microsoft' (+1 fanboi),

There's actually a very good reason for this. The market doesn't build for geeks anymore. Once upon a time computers were a very geeky thing (make no mistake, that's what an iPhone is... a computer). Products where actually marketed with us in mind.

We are still here. As a potential market we still exist but no one cares because now there are so many more 'regular' users. In comparison companies don't see us as worth marketing to.

Do you really expect people to buy a product that makes you happy regardless of their needs?

Errr no - I'm guessing you have some issues with reading comprehension . . . When discussing the pros and cons of a company/product it is important to be able to detach ones personal preferences/choices from the wider issues at hand, else all we end up doing is cheerleading the shit we like - which, although fun, is hardly enlightening . . .

If you bought it before then count it as format shifting. And bravely break laws that you find are unjust. Think of it as protest. Otherwise you are succumbing to threats by the mafiaa which is kinda lame. That and I haven't heard of anyone dling a rom getting charged millions for doing so (unlike mp3s).

There really wasn't any. I was just asking. I was surprised that the game was being re-worked (new artwork and music and all) for the iPhone and wanted to know if an Android version was coming, too. I'm wondering (not stating... WONDERING, in case the nitwit that modded my post as flamebait is reading) if apps on the iPhone make more money than comparable apps on Android. If FF comes out on both platforms, the amount of money they both bring in is really interesting to know. If the iPhone's is higher, t

Android already has a far greater variety of software then the Iphone due to the locked nature of the application delivery and development system. The Iphone simply has more of the same applications then Android or as everyone points out, 100 times the number of fart applications but no third party mail clients.

yep, and if you read the previous article, you would know developers are having problems coding for android as you never know what kind of hardware you will get.

Yet there are many many applications which perform well on all android hardware.

You logic explains why Windows is not the most popular development platform, because you never know what hardware you're going to get, nor which version of Windows,.net, DirectX and so forth. No wait...

Android, much like Windows provides a consistent framework across multiple devices. For simple applications this is very simple, for difficult applications this is difficult, the same as in Windows and there are games and applications out there so poorly coded and tested that require a very specific version of DirectX just to run, you don't think they exist because no-body buys them. Only bad developers have these problems.

PCs you assume everyone has a pointing device and a keyboard, but with phones they may have a touch screen, or lack a touch screen. There might be an accelerometer, or it might not be there. You may be able to have a physical keyboard, but a lot of Android phones don't.

I dont think you understand Android development at all.

I'm not having a go at you but you seem to miss important points which are massive flaws in your arguments.

Android much like Windows has certain minimum hardware requirements (pointing device, x number of physical buttons, display device with minimum resolution). Much like Windows I can have additional or disparate hardware (D-pad vs trackball, higher res screen) but the API's are still meant to interpret the minimum standards of input so text from a soft keyboard is treated the same as text from a physical keyboard, the d-pad on a Droid/Milestone acts the same as the trackball on my Dream/G1 from the perspective of the application as that input is coming from the OS (HAL) not the HW directly.

Your issue hinges on a program which require specific hardware to be present, if a developer has this requirement then they've made a conscious decision to use a specific platform and has to deal with the problems that arise from that. This is a conscious decision on the part of the developer, not a flaw in the OS.

A program like APNDroid will work the same on all models as it was developed to use Android API not vendor specific hardware. The same as in Windows where a game (Half Life 2 for example) will work on a Logitek keyboard as well as it would on a Microsoft keyboard because it uses the Windows API for input, not hardware specific vendor drivers.

The problem you describe is exactly the problem Operating Systems, or more specifically the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) were made to solve. It's a 25 yr old problem, with a 24 yr old solution.

Since you are so keen on "looking up" things, lets look at the actual definition:

"The applied science of equipment design, as for the workplace, intended to maximize productivity by reducing operator fatigue and discomfort. Also called biotechnology, human engineering, human factors engineering."

Please enlighten us as to how the kinds of multitasking not allowed by

So what it really comes down to is whether one really wants (in this case) a WiFi finder. I certainly won't miss such apps.

First they came for the VoIP apps, and I did not speak out--because I had unlimited minutes;Then they came for the erotic apps, and I did not speak out--because I am religous;Then they came for the WiFi stumblers, and I did not speak out--because I do not need one;Then they came for my app--and no one spoke for me because 'Apple knows best'.

A little melodramatic, maybe, but still somewhat apt I think. Apple has shown they have no qualms about removing entire categories of applications for the iPhone, all without provocation, explanation, or compensation. Anyone who depends on (develops for or uses) the iPhone in a serious business or financial sense is crazy.

Unfortunately, what you say isn't quite true. If it were, the problem would be self-correcting.

In order for app development to be financially viable, it has to possess a risk/reward ratio that compares favorably to other possible investments. Apple's trigger-happy tendencies raise the risk; but their install base and user willingness to shell out keeps the reward high. The real risk is not that they'll drive out app developers; but that they'll manage to preferentially drive out the good app developers.

If I am running some cookie-cutter app sweatshop, churning out masses of crap under one or more company names that are little more than reskins of one another, with slightly different content packs(here's an app with twenty fart noises, here's another one with the same noises that we had the intern spend ten minutes tweaking with audacity and the buttons reskinned to look more like mucus blotches! Here's 50 pictures from the cheapest softcore porn back-catalog that we were able to licence. Hey, here's the same app with 50 different pictures! And so on and so forth), all I need to do is make money on average. If some of my apps never get approved, some get sacked 18 months in, some do OK, some prove PT Barnum right yet again, I'll come out just fine. By making so many crap apps, each one representing a small investment, I spread my risk out substantially(and, since the iPhone is the hot thing among well-heeled and app-happy cellphone users, getting merely average results will probably be satisfactory, particularly if I'm paying offshore rates for my dev time).

On the other hand, some classic Mac indie dev house, pouring their heart and soul into one or two apps at a time, faces a very different situation. Their apps are substantially less likely to get shitcanned for sucking or for being tasteless; but their costs per app are comparatively huge. If an important patch update gets stuck in review hell for three weeks, while they rack up negative reviews, they are sunk. If their brilliant little gem happens to be a little too close to something Apple has planned for iPhone OS v. 4, it'll simply be murdered in the cradle without useful comment. Those odds are considerably less compelling.

If their brilliant little gem happens to be a little too close to something Apple has planned for iPhone OS v. 4, it'll simply be murdered in the cradle without useful comment.

It is the sheer nastiness of Apple's extreme highhanded policies and litigious corporate mindset that makes Apple platforms less and less attractive to me as time goes by. I have (and actually quite like) a MacBook, and the iPod is by far the best mp3 player around, but hardly a day goes by without Apple or sometimes Steve Jobs personally fucking someone over.

I'll be voting with my wallet next time any of my devices need replacing. I've been using Linux on my desktop machines for over 15 years, and there's nothing stopping me using it on my next laptop. And I will not be buying an iPhone.

We are the iBorg. Resistance is Futile. Your culture will adapt to service ours. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. And then after a period of time, we will nerf your distinctiveness because it contains naughty words or functionality we should have provided in the first place, but decided to leave it till the next version so we could milk you for another $879 bucks.

Oh, I seriously want to see them take on Motorola. Taking on HTC was like taking on the scrawny kid in school who isn't part of the "in crowd". He's not that dangerous, and nobody will back him up. Taking on Motorola would be more like a junior high art student taking on a college senior on a martial arts team.

They get away with HTC, because they know HTC's patent portfolio is thin. But all it would take is for Motorola to drop the filing cabinet on them containing their patent portfolio and Apple will craw

Generally, they can count on the developers sucking it up and coming back, or someone taking their place.

Agreed, but then again the iPhone ecosystem is a fairly new model for software. The total control that Apple demands hasn't really been tested before, most of the old-school Mac hackers are guys who really did have total control over their hardware and were able to tinker with whatever they wanted in the Mac. That's just not the case any more, so I'm interested to see how new developers who come into this model react to it. I'm willing to bet that there aren't going to be a lot of people learning to prog

You're probably right.
I bought a MacBook last year (having used Debian for the last 9 years), and while I don't dislike it, I'm not keen to buy more Apple products given dumb shenanigans like this.
So they are alienating some users.

You're probably right. I bought a MacBook last year (having used Debian for the last 9 years), and while I don't dislike it, I'm not keen to buy more Apple products given dumb shenanigans like this. So they are alienating some users.

So don't use those products you have to put up with these shenanigans. I'm typing this on my MacBook Pro, when I replace it the replacement will probably another MBP or its replacement, and if Apple were to release a bigger iPad (say 17") that runs the full OS X like my MBP does I may get one. I might also get a Mac Pro, but I do not plan on getting an iPhone or iPod.

Actually I plan on setting up my MBP to dualboot, OS X and Ubuntu, and if I were to get a Mac Pro I'd do the same with it. Now if Apple were to get as restrictive with Macs as they are with iPhones and iPads I'd move over to Linux compleatly.